books.google.com - A premier volume in Oxford's Pivotal Moments in World History series, Americanos offers an engagingly written, compact history of the Latin American wars of independence. Proceeding almost cinematically, scene by vivid scene, John Charles Chasteen introduces the reader to lead players, basic concepts,...http://books.google.com/books/about/Americanos.html?id=xEMoAQAAMAAJ&utm_source=gb-gplus-shareAmericanos

Americanos: Latin America's Struggle for Independence

A premier volume in Oxford's Pivotal Moments in World History series, Americanos offers an engagingly written, compact history of the Latin American wars of independence. Proceeding almost cinematically, scene by vivid scene, John Charles Chasteen introduces the reader to lead players, basic concepts, key events, and dominant trends, braided together in a single, taut narrative. He vividly depicts the individuals and events of those tumultuous years, capturing the gathering forces for independence, the clashes of troops and decisions of leaders, and the rich, elaborate tapestry of Latin American societies as they embraced nationhood.

From inside the book

LibraryThing Review

User Review - cao9415 - LibraryThing

John Charles Chasteen's Americanos: Latin America's Struggle for Independence relates the somewhat familiar story of the independence struggles of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in America. The ... Read full review

Quick tour d'force of Latin American independence movements. While there is a general narrative, it is broken substantially by geo-jumping throughout the hemisphere. The result of this for those unfamiliar with the pantheon of Latin American "founders" is confusion.Read full review

About the author (2009)

John Charles Chasteen is Patterson Distinguished Term Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Both a writer and a translator, his books include Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America.